Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews what he calls a “rogue’s gallery” of awful buildings constructed in the city during its recent building boom. Chicago has built 160 high rises since 1998, more than many major cities have in their entire skyline.  This boom should have brought about a renaissance of the Chicago Style, but instead the building boom has revealed how shallow the architectural talent pool is in the city. To take one botched section of the city, the cluster of new residential towers along Columbus Drive, Kamin finds one excellent building, Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Building, currently under construction, and a cluster of embarrassing neo-classical towers called Lakeshore East. Kamin notes,

Lakeshore East speaks to the quality gap between the profession’s stars and its anonymous rank and file. It’s like a baseball team that has a couple of power-hitting .300 hitters, but everybody else bats .100. You may get a home-run building here or there, but the overall quality of the architecture is anything but all-star.

I can attest to the horribleness of the buildings in Kamin’s rogues gallery. River North, the city’s art and design district, has some of the most mediocre architecture in the downtown area. Architects like Jim Loewenberg have looked beyond the River North’s trendy design boutiques to the neighborhood’s origins as a warehouse district by designing buildings that look like packing crates.  Further east, closer to the Magnificent Mile, there are some dogs, too, as the photo gallery shows.  The Antunovich Associates’ Bernardin building, named for a modest cardinal, is supposed to resemble a Florentine palazzo, but in actuality it evokes a Filene’s Basement.